Simulating darkness

A lot of people want to get moody low-light results, then aren't happy bacause the image comes out all grainy. That's thanks to the Automatic Gain Control, which electronically amplifies the image. It always results in grain. Gain is the enemy! You never want to use it. Turn it off now, I'll wait. The way to get a good low light effect is by flooding your set with light and stopping down your lens or turning down the iris control to get a dark effect. This has other benefits as well... you can control or eliminate glare, and get much better depth of field. Here's a little demonstration...

This picture was shot in low light, with the gain cranked up to try to brighten it. The only illumination came from a 75 watt household bulb directly overhead. In addition to the heavy grain and general fuzziness, note the faint blue line running vertically near the center. I notice this on every picture I've shot with the Unibrain in low light using Gain. Not sure what it is, but I don't like it! Also note how out of focus the background is. That's shallow depth of field in action.



Here's the way to do it. Flood your set with light, as bright as you can get it... well within reason anyway. Then stop down your lens, or turn down the Iris control (sometimes called the Exposure setting).

Here's where it gets interesting...


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The image on the right shows exactly what was in front of the camera... it was brightly lit. Not very moody or atmospheric, but the picture on the left shows what happened when I turned down the exposure setting. No graininess, no fuzziness, no ugly blue line, and a good depth of field. And it looks like it was shot at night with moonlight or lantern light striking the side of his face. Edge lighting like this is another trick to getting a dark effect. And sometimes filmmakers will also use a blue filter.



Tinting

Here's a little montage I did to show what can be achieved simply by fiddling with the white balance controls. The only thing changed from one picture to the next was the white balance. And you don't need to go for such dramatic results.... you can get a nice subtle color filter effect quite easily this way.


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It's actually wise to shoot your original footage without any unnatural color effects and then adjust it in post production with a program like After Effects or Cleaner. Here I created a few different versions of the same shot:



Note how much subtler the result is than the rather garish effect above it, which looks sort of pop-art. These look more like old film footage from the silent days, when they would tint the film stock.

Here's how to access the good stuff in Quicktime Pro:

Open a clip and from the File pulldown menu select Export. Now select Movie to Quicktime Movie and click the Options button. You'll get this window:



Click the Filter button for this window:



We'll call this the Filter Pane. It's the control center from which you can access all the effects to follow. From the Special Effects pulldown, select Color Tint. You can choose the default Sepia or Cobalt filters, which aren't bad, but it's a lot more fun to play around with them. Click Other for this window:



Ok, now it's time to play!!

Click the Light Color or Dark Color box and you can select your tints. Just pick one if you want, or choose different colors for the light and dark areas, which can be really interesting. Select any of the color icons across the top of the window to adjust color. The crayon box or color palettes will only let you choose from the default colors, but from the rainbow disc or the sliders you can custom tailor the tint to your exact specifications. Try making a lot of different versions of the same picture and then comparing the differences. You'll see that in some the darks and lights are too close in tone, and detail is hard to make out. In others, the difference between dark and light might be a little too pronounced, making the transitions harsh. find the balance you want.

Here are some images I made by choosing different colors for both the light and dark areas:

	Here's an interesting tone reversal accomplished by placing a light color in the Dark Color box, and a dark one in the Light Color box.

You can also adjust the opacity of the replacement colors. After selecting them, select Tint Amount from the top pulldown menu in the Filter pane:



You'll get these sliders, which let you set the opacity for the replacement colors you've chosen.





Also, play around with the other settings and options along the way.. you never know what treasures are buried in these programs till you go digging.

...And that's only Quicktime Pro! With a really high-end image or video manipulation program like Cleaner you can get even better results. Stupendous Software sells a low-cost range of iMovie plugins that can do truly stupendous things to your video. Once you've downloaded and installed one of their bundles, the effects just show up in the effects pane of iMovie. You can spend days just playing around in there... you might have to have your meals brought to you in your studio! A word of caution though... some of the Stupendous effects look a bit blocky because as I recently discovered, iMovie uses the DV codec, which reads pixels in groups of 4 rather than individually. For that reason you'd get much better results with a top end program like After Effects, but for the price, the Stupendous Software stuff can't be beat, It's definitely worth downloading and messing with, if for no other reason because it's a nice simple way to learn these effects.



Desaturate for a film-like look

Another way to affect the look of your movie is to play with the color saturation. This refers to the intensity of the color. Things shot at full saturation often look cartoonish or harsh, but if you decrease saturation it begins to look muted and more elegant. Again, it resembles old film stock with its limited range of saturation. You can get some really great effects by using color gels and then desaturating, like in this shot. There was an orange color gel over the light. Even after desaturating, it still imparts a subtle golden tone to the finished image.




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This is an interesting dilemma, because in some ways the top image looks better. It's certainly more striking visually... though the only way to justify such a powerful orange light is with a nearby fire or a really intense sunset. However, the shadow is a bit too dark, and I feel it makes the faces unreadable. At full saturation, the contrast between light and dark is too strong and overpowers the image. By reducing the saturation the contrast is evened out quite a bit, though I still wish Ahab's bad eye was a bit clearer. This was an experiment to find ways to create a sepia tone effect and at the same time draw together the different colors of the puppet's heads.



The picture below was shot at full saturation, with the lens open pretty wide, allowing a lot of light in and resulting in a shallow depth of field, made worse by the fact that it was shot with a telephoto zoom lens. Notice how completely out of focus the wall is just behind her.


Here's a more moody shot achieved through careful manipulation of shadow on the set, stopping down the lens a ways, and cranking down the saturation. Oh, and I also gathered her hair in a bit. To me, the first image demonstrates everything that's wrong with the "video look", while the second one looks like it was shot on film.



Here's how to adjust saturation in QTPro:



From the Filter Pane, open the Adjustments pulldown menu and select HSL Balance.



Here's one just because it looks really cool and I wanted to post it:


(* Open in a new window or download to your hard drive to see the full-size version)
(This particular image has too much blur, and the smaller file actually looks better)


Each of these images looks very different, all achieved through manipulation of light and color. Some of it is software based, and some actual physical control done in camera or in front of the camera. So now you know. Go forth and conquer!







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